The street was still a street, potholed and cracked, gutters flooded with dark ooze. But the solidity and familiarity of a solid road, lit every fifty paces or so by mouldering brown light, settled me enough to stop gasping and take some air in. I had to connect my I and contact Vidal, and he had to take me out of here.
As I hurtled along the road in what I thought was the direction of the centre, I grappled with the switch at the back of my neck. I lifted the hem of Vidal’s electronic top to cover my mouth and nose, but then I couldn’t breathe, so I had to run on without a shield, letting the foul rot into my lungs. I worked at the switch; the stupid thing would not turn. Then I felt the wires. Two little points of sharpness, dangling, and now the smashed casing of the switch, and I knew I was alone and unsheltered in Green Valley.
I caved then and fell to my knees on the relatively sterile strip of roadway, fighting the image of those denatured, mortified little girls, still lying there on their melting bed, physically evicting the sight until I got my breathing under control again.
Get it together, Lucie.
I couldn’t allow myself to collapse in the middle of a dark road and cry helplessly.
But three thousand lives around me… Get it together.
Two things came to mind. I could walk straight until I reached a wall, and then skirt it until I found an exit. Easier said than done in this poisoned bell jar. But Eloise was alive after eight years, and David, I tried to tell myself; the air wasn’t instantly toxic. Stumbling on in the dark remained Plan B at best. Plan A, then: try to fix the switch on Vidal’s interface, turn it on and get hold of him, or Eloise, or anyone who would lead me out of Green Valley – I’d even give myself up to Gina Orban. First, though, I’d need light to assess the damage.
The road ahead was lit with low, sulphurous light from every third lamp post, like the emergency strip lights in the corridor of a disaster-stricken office building. I realised that’s what they were – emergency lights from years ago, still drawing power from the solar-fed batteries installed when the place had been built. It made sense that Zeroth wouldn’t waste energy on real lights when everyone was living through The I. Green Valley wasn’t designed for offline interlopers. The emergency strips were too dull for me to examine the wiring, so I wandered on, casting my eyes into the textured darkness either side of me, tracing the sagging outlines of dead houses and the spindle fingers of dead trees reaching in a final grasp for the blotted sky. If The I could control my mind with a series of small electrical impulses, I told myself, surely I could do that myself. Nothing real had harmed me in Green Valley while I was connected to The I, so nothing would hurt me now.
But a scurry and a rustle to my left stopped my breath again. Something small. I peered between the dead growth towards a flickering point of brown light, my eyes picking up more detail in the gloom. I was looking down what was once a neat pathway up to a neat little Green Valley house, but the garden’s shrubberies had been left to overgrow and then die and now they formed a shield of thickly knotted twigs across the front of the porch. A low, narrow tunnel was carved through the twigs – this house was occupied by someone, or something, living.
I weighed up the potential danger from whatever could shimmy through that narrow gap between the branches against my urgency to repair the switch on Vidal’s interface, then ducked towards the brittle hedge and plunged into the gap before I could think too much about what could be living in these dark branches, or beyond, drawn like a moth compulsively towards that throb of light.
This time, the wooded tunnel didn’t play tricks on me; it was as wide as it appeared to be, and I swatted my way only a few steps through thick cobwebs, violently slapping the sticky webs out of my hair and off my skin as I emerged on the other side. Three paces from the slumping front porch, I paused. Green Valley’s concrete roof loomed over me – no fake sky, no simulated breeze, no false colour. Whatever had become of this place and the people in it, I was seeing what Green Valley really was. It had an edge; it had an end.
Taking the three groaning steps up to the porch, I ignored the symbolic twig construction nailed to the green-painted door and pushed my way through. I made towards the glow in the front room without looking up or down or to the sides, already unzipping Vidal’s top and shucking it off my shoulders, ready to scrutinise the switch’s wiring as soon as I reached the light.
When I got into the front room, though, I was forced to a halt; the word parlour rolled through my mind, the echo of a nightmare built a hundred years ago. Come into my parlour… the voices of dead children chanted in my imagination. The voices of triplet girls. The glow I’d seen from outside wavered from a coffee table that had been turned into an altar, a small twig-hewn shrine built on it. Set into the framework, dozens of pilfered emergency lights, burning brown, sulphur and ochre, undulating in waves as they jostled for control of the same hidden power source.
This was the brightest patch of light I’d come across since Eloise had disconnected me, so I squatted down by the altar and inspected the shirt. I’m not superstitious, I told myself.
I’d noticed a sort of pattern in the ripple of the lights, and I turned the broken switch to follow the brightest ebb as it swirled across the altar. The plastic casing was cracked and points of jagged metal protruded between them, along with the bare ends of four fine wires. Even if I had the right tools to strip and solder the wires back to the circuit, I wouldn’t know which wire belonged where. Plan A was finished.
Despite everything around it, this altar room felt peaceful and protected. It struck me that this was probably the artist’s purpose, and I was tempted to stay here a while, maybe just for a few minutes, maybe until someone found me. It would be a relief not to be feeling and fearing so much, to just take a rest. I was so tired; I’d barely slept for days. Just a short break. I was in the real world, safe in here, surely? The ram couldn’t find me here, and that imaginary monster was all I had to fear in Green Valley. I’d become used to the chill in the room, and maybe, if I just lay back, I’d find that the carpet that once lay here was still thick and warm and soft on the bare skin of my back.
Something crawled up my back, grappling with little hooked feet.
I sprang up, fully awake again, swatting at my skin with my hands and with the cloth of the shirt, and saw shapes drop and disappear, quick, dark blots, into the gaping black corners of the room.
My sudden motion, waving the shirt around, seemed to loosen stagnant eddies of air from dense pockets in the house, and a thick and putrid current wafted slowly from a doorway at the far end of the altar room, followed by the sound of creaking floorboards. Time for Plan B. I hurried Vidal’s top back on and ran towards the hallway, where I skidded straight into the path of a dog. Eight years ago it must have been a young retriever, someone’s pet, but now its hair was matted, its hackles raised and its teeth bared around something grey, tightly clamped. It growled from the depths of its chest, the low vibration making the air ripple and the hollow wood of the walls resonate; the house was alive and hungry, and I was already in its maw.
The dog stood its ground, front feet planted, tail between its legs, and I knew it was as afraid of me as I was of it. Fearful and ravenous – the worst type of enemy. Sparks of common wisdom chased each other through my mind: retrievers are friendly dogs; they don’t bite – it was a formula I’d trusted on my solo walks around Stanton and through the rundown parks as a child, but just like everything else, this dog had been denatured by Green Valley. I stood still. If I left the dog alone, it might just go away.
It seemed about to do that, quietening down and turning gradually away from me, but the smallest subliminal creak on the steps made it prick its ears towards a sound up the stairs, and it started its low growl again. I was standing in the altar room’s doorway with my hands up, still frozen to the spot, waiting, but the swirl of movement and sick air happened before I could even process it. A big black shape flew in a hurtling leap from the stairs onto the retriever, the growls
exploding into a burst of pure need and foul odour, and before I could even step aside, the dogs barrelled right past me – through me – into and through the altar room. I hit the floor, hard shards of wood buffered by what used to be carpet and was now a mat of mould and waste.
Amplified in the wooden house, the snarls and yips of the dog fight moved further away. Gathering my breath, I rolled myself to sitting, and saw the grey object that the retriever had been carrying in its jaws. It had landed in the spread of light from the altar, and I could see the mottled skin on its three remaining fingers.
27 Plan B, Lucie, Plan B.
It’s logical, isn’t it? You’re in the real world, with real dimensions. Just run until you find the wall, and skirt it until you find an exit.
Nothing can hurt you in here. All the damage has already been done.
Plan B, Lucie. Just keep moving. Green Valley is only three miles across.
I stopped when I came to the gatehouse that I recognised from the old brochures. The stylised Z of the logo, the bright pastel colours of the rest of the corporation’s name hung artfully over the patterned face-brick building were as clean and polished as they’d always appeared in the catalogues and news reports decades ago. This gateway to Zeroth’s Green Valley campus had been the ubiquitous symbol of modern, soft and environment-friendly business, and stood out in its pool of bright electric light like a service station on a night road.
Slowing my breathing, I approached the booth, half expecting to see a guard posted there, as if the putrefying wasteland around it was an illusion. Although the lights were on and the windows recently cleaned, the booth was empty, no screens or files on the desks, only the steady red stare of LEDs over the cameras posted to every angle around the building.
I felt the cameras on my back as I walked up the road, following a path of garden lights glowing brightly along the driveway towards a low building at the top of a gently landscaped hill. The building exuded a warm yellow glow from its banks of bright windows, looking just as it had in the tourist shots all those years ago, as if the Zeroth campus remained immune to the waste pooled at its foot.
As I approached the main doors, something moved across the bank of the upper storey’s windows, and I froze, scanning the spot, but nothing stirred. I considered going back down the slope and out of the campus, continuing on my path to the wall, but the safety of the bright, warm light was seductive. If anyone was living in here, I could face them. Far better than going back out there, into the darkness, where there was only death.
A red-eyed sensor blinked, and the front doors opened automatically, just like pre-Turn office buildings used to, citizens never considering the price of that simple convenience as the server banks stored their movements and their moods. I wondered whether anyone was watching me enter in a security office in the bowels of the building, or whether the Zeroth computers were just digitising me for later analysis and conglomeration. I felt the corporation’s clingy fingers reaching out towards me from the motion sensors and the red, unblinking eyes trailing over and through my skin.
The polished marble floors of the wide and lofty atrium gleamed, reflecting the looming shadows of three gigantic insectile shapes: three dead palm trees planted in an oasis in the middle of the space, beside the swirl of the reception desk. Zeroth: better than first was still marked out boldly across the wall behind the desk, but like the desk’s surfaces and the steel banisters and the stairs and the seating in clustered islands in the atrium – like everything above floor level – the letters were dulled and tarnished, layered with dust. A low mechanical whine, like the keen of trapped wasps, echoed from some corner of the space, but over it I could hear the bass tones of an amplified voice from somewhere further away.
I stared down at the shining floor, for a second seduced into believing I was somewhere normal again, not in a place where corpses putrefied on beds and makeshift shelves and where pet dogs scavenged body parts. For a second, I was in an anodyne office block, plush and characterless, untainted by death. But the illusion was broken by a tangled trail of shoeprints painted in sludge from the front door towards the wide, sweeping staircase leading to a mezzanine level. Strips of this muddy pathway had been erased haphazardly by whoever had cleaned the floor. Following the voice, I trailed the footprints up the stairs and to the right, where more trails of footprints converged, muddying a broad carpeted corridor towards a double door marked The Ingenuity Auditorium.
The voice began to resolve from a meaningless throb to muffled speech as I approached the doors, and I made out a male voice saying ‘…innovative product launches of the season. The Comsec team has worked for seventeen months on the project, and I’m sure you’ll be as excited by the end result as I was. Let’s ask David to tell us more.’
I pushed through the doors as quietly as I could, hit in the face by a pungent waft, and shifted my back to the wall on my right. There were about twenty broad rows of seats in the auditorium, and it was dark but for a bright projection at the back of the stage, displaying swirling colours and a square, metallic device floating in front of the Zeroth logo. The absurdity struck me then. Keeping up the pretence, like it was twenty years ago. How long had this projector been shining out its images when nobody would be off The I to see it? Nobody but me. In the darkness, I could make out the silhouettes of a scattering of people occupying a swathe of seats in the middle towards the front. An old man with a white beard and wearing a pair of jeans and a casual tan jacket, who I recognised as Jamie Egus, even with the overgrown facial hair and the extra decade, limped across the stage to sit upon a lone chair, while David approached the lectern.
What struck me most about him, seeing his real body for the first time in so many years, was how much he looked like his avatar. He seemed not to have aged, even in the midst of all this decay. He trained a steady, arrogant gaze into the camera.
He began to speak, amplified and confident: holding forth with practised peaks and troughs. This was David Coady, once Zeroth’s most charismatic director, Stanton’s fast-track success story. A massive image of his avatar’s perfectly made-up face, smooth and clean, unlike everything else in this place, was projected onto the screen behind him, bobbing and swerving in macro scale as he gestured. The cadence of his voice gripped me as I sat down to listen, and I believed what he was saying, even though I couldn’t understand it.
And I tried. At first I thought I was not seeing through the jargon, but as I concentrated harder on trying to parse the syntax of David’s words, I realised that he really wasn’t making any sense.
‘Software evangelists working with Zeroth of the most complex. Floribunda scenarios to choose the power of I-Mesh to run only selected I-Mesh devices. This number less than twelve periods.’
I tried to grab onto subjects, objects, verbs, but they were all mangled. The more I tried to focus on his words, the more the meaning slipped away.
‘Where only two of the program, and in the past, now, and the first I-Mesh device, as well as the test.’
My mind twisted and cramped, rebelling like it did the moment when I tried to look into the ram’s face. There was nothing there, only a chaotic void.
I tried to look away; I tried to stop listening. But when I let his speech wash over me without trying to understand it, his voice lulled me.
This is a man who lets his children die and then forgets them.
If Eloise had told the truth.
‘I know, and we believe that open and for a strong case under the guise of trying to cover up the real question is: “What is the real customers, compared to knowledge?” We left a lot of the daily losses.’
You saw them, Lucie. With your own eyes.
‘But it’s those failing belief in the future’ – he paused, as if scanning the room for me, even though I knew he was seeing only whatever glorious vision The I was projecting into his mind, and that he couldn’t find me because I was not on the interface – ‘those who infiltrated the organisation, trying to destroy our fut
ure generations have done honour to work.’ He was talking to me. He knew I was here. ‘Those are people who surely futureless.’
I glanced at the stage, at the giant image of David next to the small version of him at the lectern, but his image faded, replaced by the swirling Zeroth logo, and the lights came on. Jamie Egus was on his feet again, applauding in David’s direction, looking out over the dust-caked seats with an encompassing smile, as if he were riding the swell of a standing ovation. David clasped his hands together and then spread his arms wide in a crowd embrace, now a half-bow and a gesture towards Egus, the man they should all be thanking.
But there was no sound in the room, other than Egus’s clapping, and whatever rapturous applause they were hearing and seeing was being piped into their brains by The I.
David stopped and looked at me, directly at me, then turned and walked into the wings. Springing up, I vaulted onto the stage and ran across it, following him, but found only a locked door. I knew I shouldn’t, but I looked back at the small scattering of the audience where they were seated in the auditorium in their once-best suits. My eyes adjusted to the subtle lighting, I could make out hands folded neatly in laps, shoes half on where not chewed away. Lank hair, matted. The heads lolling at uncomfortable angles. Grey skin, patches of purple flesh, bare bones on old corpses.
‘David!’ I called, knowing it was hopeless, knowing he would be hearing only what he chose to hear in his gilded fantasy of corporate success. ‘David!’ I yanked at the handle, the door rattling too loudly in the auditorium. I was answered by a slow handclap from across the room.
Slap, slap, slap. Languid and ironic.
‘I’d buy what he’s selling, wouldn’t you?’ Vidal stood from his seat, far corner, front row.
‘Where the hell have you been? Where did you go?’ I regretted the relief in my voice.
But he was looking back towards the rear of the auditorium. ‘No,’ he muttered in a phone-call undertone. ‘Not right now… As agreed… It’ll be fine.’
Green Valley Page 20